The Unnecessary Good

Aimee Copeland lost her hands and her right leg to flesh eating bacteria.[1] It all started when she fell from her zip line into the Little Tallapoosa River and suffered a cut to her leg. The subsequent infection endangered her life and prompted the doctors to amputate the affected regions. With stories like this, it is easy to understand why people become suspicious of the “outside” world. Who in their right minds would want to contract a bacterium that ate at their skin? Considering that monstrous diseases are abundant everywhere, it follows that parents would want to keep their children protected in safe areas where they can’t get hurt. However, this obsession with hygiene and cleanliness may be hurting children in the long run. Although medical drug use and prevention measures are useful, they should be used in moderation to prevent any negative consequences.

Prevention measures are prevalent in our society. The notion of children having minimal contact with germs is prominent in many families. Parents would not be excited seeing their child playing outside with a handful of dirt entering the child’s mouth.  However, the microbes that parents are appalled by may be good for us during childhood. Michael Zasloff an immunologist at Georgetown University Medical Center stated that our immune systems use these early microbes to learn the correct immune responses to harmful and not harmful objects.[2] This general idea is part of the hygiene hypothesis in which too much cleanliness actually makes us sicker. A lack of the early exposure necessary to develop the immune system could result in a hypersensitive immune system that overreacts to particles like pollen. This creates a link between this lack of exposure and allergies. Along with allergies, the condition of asthma may also have strong roots to early exposure to microbes. Kathleen Barnes, an immunogeneticist at Johns Hopkins University believes that the environment heavily influences the prevalence of asthma because the rate of asthma has increased in the last 50 years. This implies that genetics is not the only factor at play. For instance, a study observed farm and non-farm children and found that the children that lived on the farms had lower rates of asthma, hay fever and eczema.[3] Since these children interacted with livestock and drank raw milk instead of microbe-free pasteurized milk, they had a chance to introduce foreign objects to their immune system. The emphasis on cleanliness in modern society restricts the development of our early immune system and thus may be harming us in the long run.

Another concern for the long run is antibiotic resistance through excessive medical treatments. Antibiotic resistance refers to the resistance that bacteria have when applying antibiotic treatment. This results in the survival of the bacteria after subjugating it to the antibiotics. Multidrug resistant bacteria or the “superbugs” pose a serious problem because they are incredibly difficult to kill. If a considerable number of bacteria species become multidrug resistant, then human society may be in big trouble. Without an easy cure for these bacteria, they may easily become the next disease like HIV to ravage populations. There are already at least 23,000 people dying every year due to antibiotic resistant bacteria.[4] This number will most likely increase as the use of antibiotics goes up and the bacteria adapt to them. The main issue is that the overuse of antibiotics is concentrated towards livestock—around 80 percent of the antibiotics sold in the United States are administered to farm animals.[5] These antibiotics are used in a “nontherapeutic” way, which means that the livestock is not even sick when given these drugs. This situation allows the bacteria to easily evolve and become resistant to the antibiotics being thrown in their direction. With antibiotics being used in excess, many strains of bacteria adapt and become resistant thereby threatening the future of our health and safety.

To preserve our health, we do want to avoid life-threatening diseases like flesh eating bacteria. Administering antibiotics to cure a potentially deadly bacterial infection is the correct procedure as well. However, we should exercise caution when we resort to using antibiotics in a reckless manner. Flesh eating bacteria is currently treatable due to antibiotics, but terrible things would happen if they became multidrug resistant. This concern is not meaningless fear mongering. Superbugs already exist and are raising health concerns. In a similar manner, the rise of asthma and allergies in the past 50 years is also not a fantasy. The truth is that we were meant to experience the world and its potential dangers. We should not preemptively try to avoid potential dangers by condemning our children to lives of hermitage. Only when a real risk arises that necessitates action should we apply the solution. Life is about living freely and experiencing the unknown, rather than restricted by the chains of potential dangers.